We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
The Crime and Policing Bill, currently completing its passage through Parliament, represents the most comprehensive assault on the traditional liberties of the freeborn Englishman since the Stuart kings. It is more dangerous than those royal provocations, because it comes dressed in the language of safety, of community, of respect, and because it is only part of a wider pattern that, when you step back and see it whole, should stop the blood.
Let me begin with a man most people have never heard of. Giles Udy is one of Britain’s finest historians of Soviet Communism. His book Labour and the Gulag is a work of meticulous, uncomfortable scholarship, tracing the seduction of the British left by the Bolshevik experiment. He has spent twenty years studying what it actually looks like when a state decides that its ideological certainty entitles it to total control over those who do not share its worldview.
Udy has recently made a statement that I suspect cost him some effort to compose. He is not a man given to hyperbole. But writing about Soviet repression, he finds it, as he puts it, “really hard to bring a similar accusation against the Labour government and Keir Starmer.” Hard, but he reaches it nonetheless. “What Labour and the old Soviet regime do have in common,“ he concludes, “is the arrogant belief that they alone hold the moral high ground and that this entitles them to total control over all those who do not share their worldview.“
He is careful to note we have no Gulag, no death penalty. So am I. But his observation about the tools of control is what should make us stop. Legislation, and courts co-opted to apply it. The policing of dissent, hate crime orders, arrests, the long-term seizure of electronic appliances to intimidate those against whom no charges are ever brought. Twelve thousand arrests annually for social media posts. The framing of dissent as fascism, a habit, Udy notes, with deep roots in the Labour movement’s Stalinist period, when ‘fascist‘ became the approved term for anyone who inconveniently noticed what was happening in Moscow. Orwell’s thought crime, he argues, has become a reality. It is 2026, and he cannot believe what he is seeing. Nor can I.
What is still so lacking in these arguments [about Brexit] is even a smattering of emotional intelligence. No one fully understood the implications of Brexit but when so much of the establishment, the great and the good, the entire culture industry, told everyone to vote Remain then it was obvious that many would stick two fingers up.
This was described as a monumental act of self-harm, but I always understood the Leave impulse as coming from an England that would not do as it was told.
That England never went away. That England is still continually being ticked off for expressing its identity incorrectly. Yet, as we have just seen in the local elections, both the Scots and the Welsh have voted for their own nationalist politicians. The Leave vote was an expression of cultural identity.
“The richest person in the world in the 1830s was Nathan Rothschild, whose personal net worth was around 0.6 per cent of national income. Despite this vast fortune, Rothschild died at age 58 in 1836 of an infection that $10 of antibiotics could likely cure today. Similarly, the richest people in the world today, such as Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, presumably have a marginal utility from additional consumption spending that is zero. Nevertheless, their utility still increases when new goods (smartphones or LLMs) are invented. These examples suggest that more consumption of a fixed set of goods eventually hits a marginal utility of zero while the invention of new goods or higher quality goods continues to increase wellbeing.”
As seen on a Students For Liberty comment on a Facebook page I follow. The quote was cited by this chap: Karthik Tadepalli, of the Becker Friedman Institute For Economics, University of Chicago. I don’t have the original link. There are some super-smart young classical liberals out there, and many seem to be coming from places such as Eastern Europe, India, etc.
The point about marginal utility reminds me of a comment from Perry Metzger on this blog on 2014, debunking the Thomas Piketty book that purported to claim that wealth rises faster than the overall economy and that the “rich” will eventually swallow up the world unless restrained by wealth taxes and so on. Perry M got in a reference to Douglas Adams, which is always the mark of a good article, IMHO.
Police are appealing for information about a racially-motivated attack on a taxi driver in Belfast.
Two men and a woman approached the taxi driver on Talbot Street at about 23:10 BST on Saturday and, after being refused a lift, they became aggressive and used racial slurs.
The taxi driver, who is in his 30s, was spat at and struck by one of the men and he hit the ground and lost consciousness. As he got back up, he was hit by a second man.
The three people then made off on foot in the direction of the city centre.
‘Unprovoked attack’
Inspt Moutray from the Police Service of Northern Ireland ( PSNI) described it as an “unprovoked attack, which is being treated as a racially-motivated hate crime”.
“There is no place for hate, racism or violence in our communities, and everyone has the right to feel safe and treated with dignity and respect,” the officer said.
“The area was fairly busy at the time, as would be expected for a Saturday evening, and we’d ask anyone who witnessed this assault to get in touch.
“The woman is described as wearing a black dress, while both men are described as being of muscular build and were wearing a white shirt and red T-shirt.”
I do not know if the decision to hide the race of the victim and the suspects was taken by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, the BBC, or both. Whoever it was, they cannot care very much about actually catching the perpetrators. Do they seriously think that someone reading the above who was in the area at the relevant time would have their memory jogged by mention of the colour of the woman’s dress or the men’s shirts? For any crime at all, giving a description of a suspect that leaves out their skin colour is unlikely to be productive in prompting witnesses to come forward. When the crime is a a racial attack such playacting becomes even more outrageous.
I’ve finally figured out why I find Wes Streeting so grating. It’s because he bigs up his working-class origins even as he shits all over working-class Britain. ‘I’m from Stepney’, he chirps, like a camp Dick van Dyke, before looking down his Cambridge-educated nose at his fellow oiks who voted for Brexit. He wears his humble roots like fancy dress to disguise his lofty indifference to the populist beliefs of those who don’t only come from working-class Britain but still live there. ‘I’m one of you’, he says, when every Brit with a brain knows he’s one of Them.
The paper’s authors are too diplomatic to say it directly, but the implication is clear: Rachel Reeves is pursuing a policy that risks making the crisis she fears more likely, not less. Markets have noticed. Long-dated gilt yields have been rising for most of 2025 even as the Bank of England has been cutting interest rates, a dissociation that signals precisely the kind of underlying distrust the paper warns about.
The question the paper ultimately poses is not an economic one. It is a political one. These reforms, the civil service reductions, the welfare tightening, the Bank of England adjustments, the net zero rephrasing, are all achievable. They were, in many cases, the settled common ground of British economic management not long ago. The question is whether any government has the nerve to implement them before a crisis compels it, or whether, as the authors quietly and rather despairingly note, “even among policy experts there is growing recognition that much of what needs to be done will not be attempted until a crisis compels it.“
That sentence should haunt anyone who reads it. Because what it describes is not a failure of economics. It is a failure of political will. And in a democracy that has spent six years lurching from one emergency to another, we should not be sanguine that the compulsion will arrive in time, or in a form we would choose.
Break the glass now, or wait for someone else to break it for you. That is the choice. And this paper, to its credit, has at least had the honesty to say so.
“The return of the Right in 2016 and again in 2024 was not an intellectual revival. It was not driven by theory or political philosophy, but by visibility and reach: Jordan Peterson debating feminists, Charlie Kirk confronting campus socialists, Donald Trump dominating the podcast circuit. The Right returned culturally, but with an intellectual vacuum at its centre: most notably, a lack of serious economics.
For classical liberals looking back decades from now, this revival of the Right is unlikely to inspire them in the way Thatcher and Reagan still do today. The politicians of the 1980s were what George Will called ‘conviction politicians’: figures who entered politics with a coherent social creed. Politics for them was not merely about remaining in power, but about pursuing a broader mission of prosperity. That mission was not to control the economy toward a collective goal, but to empower individuals to make their own decisions.
Today’s Right, by contrast, is dominated by political entrepreneurs: figures highly skilled at attracting attention and mobilising voters. By nature, they are populists, and populism is the direct translation of public emotion into government policy. Without intellectual grounding, politics becomes purely oppositional. Today, lacking any clear sense of direction in economics, the Right is often effective at identifying problems but incapable of solving them.”
There is, however, a still more fundamental cause, one I have not ceased to articulate: our managerial system of government is breaking down under the weight of a welfare state we cannot afford and which fails to meet expectations.
Promises made to successive generations cannot be met from our productive output. The gap has been filled by debt and by the systematic debasement of the currency since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971. In the nineteenth century, a pound in 1900 bought roughly as much as a pound in 1800. Since 1971, the purchasing power of money has collapsed. That is not a coincidence. That is policy.
I put this thesis to Rishi Sunak in a private meeting. He readily agreed I was right. The room of some thirty MPs looked crestfallen, until someone said, “But we can’t do anything about it before the election” whereupon everyone relaxed and reverted to type. That moment encapsulates our problem precisely.
Liz Truss understood the fiscal reality and tried to act on it. She was also, simultaneously, spending enormous sums on an energy bailout. The bond markets noted the contradiction and drew their own conclusions. She was unlucky with undiagnosed structural problems in bond markets while caught between two incompatible imperatives. Her underlying diagnosis was not wrong.
It turns out reality is not optional. You can ignore it, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring it. Rachel Reeves and the whole nation are discovering this now, after the Chancellor brought welfare cuts to MPs who told their constituents for years that austerity is a choice and said, “No thank you!”
Starmer’s current crisis sits at this junction: a government elected on the promise that “change” would be painless, running head‑first into the arithmetic they declined to discuss.
The way in which they miss the point, is exactly why Labour does. It describes a desire for democratic control of institutions as a ‘dark path’ yet simultaneously support a party that is bringing in Digital ID, curtailing jury trials and the rest. We are on a dark path already.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa
Recent Comments